A korai ómagyar kori í ~ é szembenállás vizsgálatának lehetőségei és korlátai

Abstract

Opportunities and Limitations of Studying the í ~ é Opposition of the Early Old Hungarian Era In former scholarly publications we may find only uncertain references to the regional characteristics of the í ~ é opposition of the Old Hungarian Era; the de-tailed analysis of the phenomenon from the perspective of historical dialectology and phonology has still not been completed due to the problematic nature of the issue. In this paper I explore the problems related to the study of the regional at-tributes of the í ~ é opposition and in this process I outline findings related to pho-nological dialectological phenomena from the Old Hungarian Era that are valid in a broader context as well. It is not an easy task to identify lexeme pairs with an í ~ é opposition. One of the reasons for this is the orthographic inconsistency characteristic of the era in gen-eral, while the other cause is that historically there are no homogeneous phenome-na underlying these differences. In my paper I present the regional features of the í ~ é opposition during the Old Hungarian Era while considering these difficulties as well. When studying data exemplifying the í ~ é opposition, however, I also ad-dressed a more general topic, the source value of data from the perspective of his-torical dialectology in charters that have not survived in their original form. Keywords: historical dialectology, phonology, í ~ é opposition